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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Silver Lining?

While I was shocked at the Supreme Court's upholding of SCOTUScare by insisting that the statutes couldn't possibly mean the actual states when they mention a state setting up an exchange, when it was clear that the intent was to pressure states to set up exchanges, I did hold out hope there was a silver lining.

Roberts’s ruling advanced a crucial conservative objective, that of clawing back power from the executive branch and independent agencies that increasingly operate essentially free from congressional control and generally obedient to presidents. If conservatives cannot achieve their objectives, including ACA repeal, through the legislative branch, conservatism’s future is too bleak to be much diminished by anything courts do. If, however, conservatives can advance their agenda through Congress, they will benefit from Roberts’s ACA opinion, which buttresses legislative supremacy.

Perhaps. And I think he is right that the best remedy is legislative with a president who will sign the legislation rather than the courts.

But the hit on rule of law when words no longer have meaning apart from what is expedient at the moment is so disturbing that I can't get on board this as a subliminal victory.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!